Balance of Power in Peer Victimization: The Role of Rivalry and Vulnerability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated characteristics associated with two kinds of peer victimization—bullying victimization and adversarial victimization—distinguished by different balances of power between the perpetrator and victim. Specifically, we examined whether bullying victimization (victim has less power than perpetrator) would be experienced to a greater extent by vulnerable adolescents with psychosocial difficulties (fewer close friendships, emotional symptoms) and less peer esteem (physical attractiveness, perceived popularity, dating popularity, and prestige). In contrast, we investigated whether adversarial victimization, in which the victim has equal or greater power than perpetrator, would be experienced by adolescents perceived as rivals because they are held in high esteem by peers. A total of 599 adolescents aged 9 to 14 years ( M = 11.93; SD = 1.40) completed a self-report measure of emotional symptoms and peer nomination measures of victimization, close friendship, physical attractiveness, dating popularity, perceived popularity, and prestige. Bullying victimization was negatively associated with close friendships, physical attractiveness, perceived popularity, and prestige, whereas adversarial victimization was positively associated with all four indicators of peer esteem. The results demonstrate the importance of measuring the power balance between the perpetrator and victim when studying peer victimization. Findings are discussed from an evolutionary perspective suggesting that victims of bullying are selected by perpetrators to achieve adaptive benefits while minimizing retaliatory, reputational, and social costs, whereas victims of adversarial aggression are targeted as rivals in competition for status and mates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".